(Reuters photo)Mark Leiser wasn’t tweeting about a bomb, nor was he suggesting any other violent act to commit aboard a plane. All Leiser did was tweet that a flight delay was going to prevent a soldier from getting where he needed to be, and that was enough for an airline to stop him from boarding the flight.

The tech law columnist for The Drum and professor sent out this tweet about a 90 minute flight delay on September 24:

Flight delayed 90min. Soldier going to miss last connection & @easyjet refusing to help pay for him to get to Portsmouth. Get right into em!

Many of the spambots on Twitter – accounts that spit out seemingly incoherent and/or robotic phrases, often when someone uses a particular word, phrase or hashtag – are good for a mild chuckle every now and then, but it’s rare that one catches on quite like @Horse_ebooks. Seemingly more profound than most spambots found on Twitter, @Horse_ebooks spawned a fandom, as people dedicated fan fiction, poetry and a senior yearbook quote to the strange missives that the account spewed.

Some speculated that it was an attempt by an online bookstore to drum up interest, only to be left, neglected, to generate strange statements seemingly at random. Others thought it might have been a bot that was sharing excerpts from an upcoming book or movie. And there were a select few who thought that one of the spambots on Twitter had gained sentience and was trying to reach out – those people were largely ignored.

In its next attempt to take down Apple’s popular iPad, Microsoft has unveiled its next generation of tablets. At a presentation this morning, Microsoft debuted the Surface 2 and the Surface Pro 2, both of which build on the features of their predecessors, and bring many of the features that users wanted right out of the gate.

Microsoft seemed to take many of the complaints users had with and incorporated them into the latest models, including a new two-position kickstand that makes holding the tablet on your lap and typing much more comfortable. The detachable keyboard now also includes a backlight, for typing in low-light conditions.

The overall appearance of the device has been tweaked slightly, with the Surface 2 being made thinner and lighter than its predecessor. It also comes in a new silver metal-coloured back, and new colours of keyboard have been shown for both devices, too. The screens on both tablets are the same size, but now support 1080p.

Despite some early hiccups on the day of the roll-out, due to the overwhelming demand, many iPhone and iPad users are now running iOS 7 on their mobile devices. As promised, Apple has made some significant changes to the look, the functionality and just about every other aspect of the OS. And that’s left some people feeling kind of overwhelmed, unsure where they should start navigating.

Quite frankly, a lot of people are feeling like this little kid:

Poor little guy. But you don’t have to be upset, once you know how to take advantage of the new features of iOS 7. With a few tips and tricks, you’ll feel right at home in iOS 7 in no time:

How to close apps

Closing apps has been simplified – and as a result, a lot of people are a little confused. No more double-tapping the home button and pressing the red sign. Instead, you still double-tap the home button, only this time, put your finger on the window of the app you want to close, and swipe up. Away it goes, the app is now closed.

Netflix's Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings.It’s true that many Canadians have adopted the popular streaming television and movie service Netflix, but has it really helped curb piracy in Canada? Netflix CEO Reed Hastings certainly thinks so.

In a recent interview with Dutch website Tweakers while promoting the launch of Netflix Netherlands, Hastings was asked if he believed people would make the switch from torrenting media to Netflix, and he said they would. When pressed for examples, Macleans reports, Hastings cited Canada as an example of a market where it had happened:

“Bittorrent traffic’s down by about 50 per cent since Netflix launched three years ago,” Hastings said in reference to Canada.

While Netflix declined to provide the source for that statistic, there is some evidence, like this 2012 report, which some argue is an indication that presenting legal alternatives to piracy is enough to convince pirates to go legal.

The time is finally here for Apple iPhone users: you can now upgrade to the new mobile operating system iOS 7. Anyone who has an iPhone 4, iPhone 4S or iPhone 5 can update now by going to the General tab under Settings, then clicking software update. If you have an iPod Touch (5th generation 16GB, 32GB or 64GB), iPad 2, iPad with Retina Display or iPad Mini, you can also update to iOS 7.

You’ll need to make sure you have 3.1 GB of space available on your phone in order to install the new operating system, so consider now the perfect time to clean out those selfies in your photo album that you don’t really need, or those apps you downloaded, tried once and have never touched again.

It’s also a good idea to make sure your apps are all updated before jumping in to iOS 7, in order to make sure they’re compatible. Many app publishers have been pushing out updates all week (with a huge flood of them today), so turn on your

All across the world, fans of the Grand Theft Auto series lined up to be the first to get their hands on the newest release from publisher Rockstar: Grand Theft Auto V. Midnight launches in Canada, the U.S. and many other countries saw crowds waiting outside of video game stores for hours, all so they could pick up the game, and head home to play.

And if the reviews that have come out are any indication, there’s good reason for that: many reviewers have been giving GTA V a perfect score, not something easily found in the video game industry. On metacritic, a website that curates review scores from all over the web, it has an average score of 97.5/100 (97 for the PS3 edition, 98 for the Xbox 360 version – and if that holds, it will be the best reviewed Xbox 360 game of all time). Here’s a sampling of what some people have been saying about the game:

“No other world in video games comes close to this in size or scope, and there is sharp intelligence behind its sense of humour and gift for

In the midst of U.S. citizens being outraged that their emails and text messages may have been read by their government, a California school district is taking a risk by electing to monitor its students.

Students in Glendale, California will need to watch what they write if they don’t want to be reprimanded for posting derogatory things to others online. The school district has hired an outside contractor, Geo Listening, to monitor the activities of its students, and look for not only signs of bullying, but also indications of a potential suicide about to happen.

CNN reports the district saw two of its students commit suicide in the past two years, prompting Glendale to look into ways to prevent these incidents from occurring. Superintendent Richard Sheehan said that the firm was hired on an interim basis last spring, and during that time, the firm flagged a student who was talking about ending his life.

“We were able to save a life,” Sheehan told CNN. “It’s just another avenue to open

In an old and empty swimming pool in Glasgow, musician Julian Corrie is surrounded by unusual instruments: a SEGA Mega Drive, a Commodore 64, many floppy disk drives and outdated hard drives.

The song he plays is called “Polybius”, reminiscent of a 1980s arcade game, and the source of an Internet urban legend wanting that its users would go crazy after using it. Far from this creepy tale, the video, in the words of its creators, is meant to be “a nostalgic farewell to forgotten friends.”

A few weeks before the release, Scottish director and designer James Houston had reached out to Corrie and asked him write the lyrics for a song that would use outdated technology in an ensemble. Houston's creative experiment started in 2008, when he made a student film titled “Big Ideas: Don’t Get Any.” The short video was an unusual cover of Radiohead’s "Nude" that used rigged MIDI instruments along with old computer equipment.

(Screengrab from Galapagos Islands trek on Google)As part of its continuing efforts to explore remote or unique locations around the world through Treks, Google Maps has partnered with the Charles Darwin Foundation to let anyone with an internet browser explore Galapagos National Park.

And if that wasn’t cool enough, you can help further scientific research by poring over those images, and report what you see for further investigation by scientists.

Using the Darwin for a Day online app and the footage gathered by Google Maps on their trek through the Galapagos Islands, you can hunt for creatures, then submit your observations with key information like how abundant the creature was in the area, and what kind of habitat it’s in.

If you don’t feel like joining the research team and just want to bask in the sights of sea lions, giant tortoises and blue-footed boobies, you can visit the Galapagos Islands trek page here.